What’s the Point
There is a certain sort of melancholy that comes from knowing the truth. There isn’t anything wrong with depressed people, it’s just that they see the futility of most human endeavors. And can’t ignore the fact that hello we are all going to die someday and so is the universe so there will be nothing to remember that you ever existed, not your descendants or if you become famous. Sometimes I feel like depression is like taking the red pill, and you feel all the illusions blur and zip around and before your eyes.
We scurry throughout the city like ants in an ant nest. Everyday we go from the same building through the tube (where we ignore other people) to that other same building doing Very Important Things. We talk about Very Important Things.
Have you ever looked at someone while they were talking and then you realize you’re not looking at someone but rather at their face, their face made of skin and hair and squishy slimy eyeballs. Have you ever looked someone in the eye and then all of a sudden you don’t feel like you’re looking them in the eye but rather at their eye and the black dot in the middle of it. And it’s like their body is just a suit. And then all this self esteem beauty talk seems so stupid, both the good and the bad. It’s all just about more flesh or less flesh or this flesh or that flesh.
Who cares.
I was listening to this WTF with Marc Maron episode and in the intro he was talking about being aware of his corporeal body, rubbing his thumb against his forefinger. This body is yours but it’s not you. Your body is a machine given to you to operate.
It’s so weird being human, where we have the capacity to be conscious of our finiteness, and yet our contemplation of our finiteness is defined and limited by the same material that enables our self-awareness. This jiggling gray pudding with jolts of electricity that run through it.
Humans are capable of such varied and profound emotional journeys, but does it take away from the breadth knowing from a bird’s eye view that you are limited by your medium, that jiggling gray thing?
Your therapist can’t help you with this, she only helps you rationalize so you can best enjoy your time here. Therapists have their own shit to deal with.
But what is the limit? Maybe there is no limit? What is the edge of humanity, the good edge? Look how far we have come, although from the beginning to now I suppose it is debatable whether it is far forward or far away from our true essence, our highest self. Nevermind the hills and valleys in between–no one can disagree that women and minority races gradually becoming recognized as equals to the white man is a bad thing, but suppose in the very beginning they were never seen as anything less.
What is Beauty anyway? What of our appreciation for it.
Life is a relay. we all stop and start, but in different places, passing off our knowledge and memory to the next, and the next and the next….
*Existential Crisis brought to you by: The Universe Dying, Going to a former mentor’s memorial, that Sense of Self episode of Fresh Air where people think they’re dead and think certain limbs are extraneous
*Previous Existential Crisis brought to you by: Reading The Stranger by Albert Camus, learning about ancient Egyptian Burial Rituals, applying to college